I'm surprised at that on the reliability front - things are a fuss to get going, but if you're on a LTS version of whatever-distro, its usually pretty rock-solid (hence why its powering everything you look at...)
I think I may have been trying to appeal to the masses - would agree, seems to be a lot more straightforward installing linux. The installer "Just works" (try pointing windows setup at a disk with something it doesn't understand on it...), and the driver support is generally fantastic. When you do need proprietary drivers, its generally taken care of too (thinking of NVidia etc)
